Shell history not being written to specified history file

[Brett Simpson]

Pete,
I believe it's running .profile since the variables I defined there are being assigned.

[Brett Simpson]

Dennis,
Very near the top of .profile.

[Peter Nikitka]

Hi,

do once a
touch $HISTFILE
and re-login.
Then check for updates of this file.

mfG Peter

[Brett Simpson]

Peter,
I just tried that with the same results. Still just getting the date that I logged in.

[Dennis Handly]

>Still just getting the date that I logged in.

Throw everything in your .profile away.
Just have:
export HISTFILE=$HOME/.${LOGNAME}_history
export HISTFILE=500
date >> $HISTFILE

See if this works.

Ah, you absolutely can't do this:
date >> $HISTFILE

The shell history file is a binary file and you can't fiddle with it.
And I don't really see how to get a command with a date in the history file, unless you type it in.

[Brett Simpson]

Dennis,
I've tried that and it didn't work either. It wrote nothing to the $HISTFILE that I defined. If I do an echo $HISTFILE, it shows that valus that I defined.

Just keeps writing to the .sh_history file. Is there somewhere else that I need to define the history file that I want to user?

[Dennis Handly]

>Is there somewhere else that I need to define the history file that I want to use?

No, this works fine for ksh. What shell are you using and are you talking about root?

[Brett Simpson]

I'm using ksh and it's a non-root account. Here's the update:

I just created the same test user on a different server and it worked great. So, no I'm wondering if something is set up on this server that's stopping it from working. There must be some setting that's preventing it from working.

[Dennis Handly]

>There must be some setting that's preventing it from working.

Have you removed the corrupted history file?
Is $HOME over NFS?

[Brett Simpson]

Here's the lastest update:

If I login and then type ksh, then it starts logging to the correct history file. So, it appears that my ksh shell is not being invoked on login?

Any ideas?